Jump to navigation Skip to content
“Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways...” This Motionpoems short film by Anais LaRocca features Maggie Smith’s title poem from her third collection, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017).
“It’s full of bold writing, fresh writing, accomplished writing, from points of view that aren’t always expected.” Judges Margaret Busby, Lee Child, Sameer Rahim, Lemn Sissay, and Emily Wilson talk about the thirteen novels longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, which includes This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel, The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, Real Life by Brandon Taylor, and How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang.
Hey mi gente, I want to jump right in and continue with the interviews I’ve been able to hold with local Houston writers about life during the pandemic. For this series, I reached out to writers and posed one simple question:
What have you been doing since the pandemic started?
This series began with insights from Katie Hoerth and Daniel Peña, and this week, I bring you poet Melissa Studdard. Studdard is the author of five books and the recipient of the 2019 Penn Review Poetry Prize and the 2019 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Her works include the poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press, 2014), and the poetry chapbook, Like a Bird With a Thousand Wings (Saint Julian Press, 2020). Her writing has been published in the New York Times, POETRY, Kenyon Review, and the Guardian.
Here is what Melissa had to say:
“Like so many others, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get my head around what’s happening. Kelli Russell Agodon and I have been coauthoring poems five days a week that grapple with this new life we’re living and how suddenly it was thrust upon us. As well, I pen a daily poem for the Grind. Outside of writing, I’ve been cooking, gardening, spending a lot of time with my kid, and reading. In some ways, it feels like everything has changed, and in others, it feels like nothing has changed. I still do a lot of the same things, but differently. Whereas before I was a little more solitary and introspective, now I seek connection in everything. When I read, I read to understand, as deeply as possible, other humans. When I garden, I want to know the tomato, feel the basil, be the soil. The pandemic has forced me to slow down and see things I looked past before. Everything feels so fragile now; I want to take great care with it all. I don’t want to take anything for granted.
I have also been collaborating with a composer friend, Christopher Theofanidis, with whom I recently released a chapbook of my poems and fragments of his musical scores called Like a Bird With a Thousand Wings. The musical scores are from his composition “The Conference of the Birds,” which is based on Attar’s allegorical poem by the same title. All the release performances and activities were cancelled, so we’ve been doing limited virtual events instead, and we’ve begun work on an oratorio based on Hesse’s Siddhartha. In addition to my own writing, I’ve been trying to support other writers. Among other small gestures, I’ve held some monthly drawings on Twitter to give writers money for contest entry fees. I had the good luck of winning several contests recently, and I was thinking about how there are a lot of writers who should be placing in and winning contests but can’t afford to participate. I wanted to spend some of my winnings to help them enter contests because I think it’s important right now to find ways to make and give joy, and to create things for ourselves and others to look forward to.”
Photo: Melissa Studdard. Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.“In Spanish, our stories are slow, then fast, and we cackle constantly, even when we talk about the dead.” In this 2016 Radar Reading Series video, Ingrid Rojas Contreras reads from her memoir-in-progress about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia, and how she and her mother both experienced amnesia.
The author of the story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears talks about ghost stories, writing in the direction of the unknowable, and creativity during quarantine.
“There are some stones that open in the night like flowers / Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.” In this video, Jackie Kay, national poet laureate of Scotland, reads her poem “The Red Graveyard” about her connection to American blues singer Bessie Smith. Kay’s biography Bessie Smith is forthcoming in February from Faber.
In this edition of PEN to Paper, James Hannaham talks about how “word choice creates atmosphere and character all by itself” and leads writers through several language-related exercises, including one that involves taking a New York Times online quiz on dialect.
“The deal with Florida is the charlatans and lunatics and Snapchat-famous plastic surgeons. It is the Ponzi schemes, the byzantine corruption, the evangelical fervor and the consenting-adult depravity....” In this Books & Books virtual event, Kent Russell reads from his memoir, In the Land of Good Living (Knopf, 2020), and discusses Florida and his writing experience with author and sibling Karen Russell. In the Land of Good Living is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Since 2008, Kresge Arts in Detroit has awarded more than $5 million to Detroit artists through their annual awards and Kresge Artist fellowships. I have the privilege of working at InsideOut with Shawntai Brown, one of the 2020 Kresge Fellowship recipients, and was able to sit down with her to speak about her work and the literary community in Detroit.
Brown is a local poet and playwright whose work centers around Black queer characters, experiences, and histories. When I asked what she enjoys best about Detroit’s literary world, she said: “The support! There is an excitement about the work being done, and I have met so many encouraging fellow writers who simply love having more voices on the page and stage.” I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. I find that there is a belief in the creation of new and unexpected literary exploration in our city.
As a Kresge Live Arts Fellow, Brown has the opportunity to connect to a wide range of artists, organizers, and mentors, which she feels is necessary for her work to come alive. “My playwriting is a communal undertaking. I need to see the work on its feet to really come into conversation with it. It takes a village to raise a play,” said Brown. “This year is about financing and stage productions, collaborating and carving more space to retreat and create.”
To close, I asked Brown to share a word for anyone who is exploring Detroit’s artist community for the first time. “Look everywhere,” she said. “Take the bus and ride your bike to harvest an intimacy with the city. Where the art and the artist come from is a huge part of the texture of the creation. Detroit has art spilling out of every part of the city, so build relationships with various communities.”
Photo: Shawntai Brown. Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.“When people say nothing has changed, we’re trying to say through March, come and walk in my shoes.” In this 2013 Politics and Prose Bookstore video, the late congressman and author John Lewis speaks about the personal experiences that led to the creation of his award–winning graphic memoir trilogy March, cowritten by Andrew Aydin and illustrated and lettered by Nate Powell. Lewis died at the age of eighty on July 17, 2020.
